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All Tomorrow's Parties is no more

Before last week, the future seemed bright for artist-curated music festival All Tomorrow’s Parties. With a string of international events, including the Yeah Yeah Yeahs curating I’ll Be Your Mirror at Alexandra Palace, Nick Cave taking the ATP festival to a former NATO base in Iceland, and a positive spate of holiday-camp merriment set for 2013, the last thing anyone was expecting was for it to come to such an abrupt conclusion. The two weekend events at Camber Sands this November and December will be the festival's last.

ATP’s extraordinary, 13-year run started in 2000, when founder Barry Hogan persuaded Mogwai to curate the first-ever festival, bringing together acts such as Arab Strap, Sigur Rós and Clinic to the Butlins holiday camp in Minehead, Somerset. It proved a winning formula. Musicians liked the fact that it was driven by artists as opposed to promoters, and had a low-key, sponsorship-free atmosphere that stood in stark contrast to the bigger festivals such as Reading or Glastonbury.

For the audience, the fact that there were no separate areas for artists meant that going to ATP gave you a chance to mingle with bands over the weekend, as opposed to simply glimpsing them on a distant stage. Back in 2000, before the rapid mushrooming of boutique festivals, this was a pretty radical concept. And it took off. Within two years, there was a US version, and the British event split into two separate weekends instead of one. An ATP stage appeared at Barcelona’s Primavera festival and an Australian incarnation of the festival was launched. As if this wasn’t enough, a new series of one-day events were launched. I’ll Be Your Mirror – named after the B-side of the Velvet Underground single "All Tomorrow’s Parties" – is essentially the same format as the festival but minus the holiday resort.

Listed like this, the sudden end of ATP makes more sense: it has outgrown itself. Its charm lay in its DIY mentality – using a holiday camp as a base, allowing bands to dictate the line-up, and relying on a core attendance of dedicated music fans to support it. The sheer number of events has taken its toll on the line-up, which in recent years has seen a core group of regulars emerging. Although they’re undeniably good bands, the events have lost the freshness and diversity that characterised the early years. Added to this, as ATP has evolved into an ever more global affair, the grass roots element has been eroded.

Founder Barry Hogan’s desire to preserve the festival’s authenticity – by calling a halt to it before it has a chance to stale or mutate into another commercial-driven affair – is manifested in his unusual choice of headliner for the final weekend: eighties alt-rock band Loop, who are temporarily reforming for the event. In previous years, line-ups were selected by bands such as Portishead, My Bloody Valentine and Animal Collective, although the curators weren’t exclusively musicians – Jake and Dinos Chapman, Matt Groening and Jim Jarmusch have all taken a turn at the festival.

The two remaining weekends will be a swan song for All Tomorrow’s Parties. Pontins holiday park at Camber Sands will be a sadder, if quieter, place.

Bertie Carvel's diary: What would the French think about infidelity to Doctor Foster?

According to the adage, the first thing an actor does when he gets a job is to go on holiday. And so, having finished our sold-out run of James Graham’s Ink at the Almeida and with the show (in which I play a young Rupert Murdoch) about to transfer into the West End, I’m packing my bags.

But before I can skip town, I’ve one more professional engagement: the press launch of series two of the BBC drama Doctor Foster, which we finished filming at Christmas. I’ve now seen the final cut of all five episodes, and I’m excited to share it with an audience. There’s no substitute for seeing other people’s reactions at first hand, especially with a show that got people talking so much first time around, and it’s electric to sit in a cinema full of expectant journalists and commentators and feel the room respond. Nothing beats this: to put so much into making a thing and then experience an audience’s unmediated, reflexive reaction. When it goes well, you feel that you’ve shared something, that you’ve all recognised something together about how things are. It’s a unifying feeling. A sort of bond.

Cheating spouses

Handling the interviews has been tricky, when there’s so little one can say without giving the plot away. (The first series began with Suranne Jones’s character Gemma, a GP, suspecting her husband Simon of having an affair.) What’s more, lots of the questions invite moral judgements that I’ve tried my best to avoid; I always think it’s really important not to judge the characters I play from outside, but simply to work out how they feel about themselves, to zero in on their point of view. There’s a sort of moral bloodlust around this show: it’s extraordinary. People seem to want to hear that I’ve been pilloried in the street, or expect me to put distance between myself and my character, to hang him out to dry as a pariah.

While I’m not in the business of defending Simon Foster any more than I’m in the business of attacking him, I am intrigued by this queer mixture of sensationalism and prurience that seems to surface again and again.

Shock horror

Oddly enough, it’s something that comes up in Ink: many people have been surprised to find that, in a story about the re-launch of the Sun newspaper in 1969 as a buccaneering tabloid, it’s the proprietor who considers dropping anchor when the spirit of free enterprise threatens to set his moral compass spinning.

I’ve never given it much thought before, but I suppose that sensationalism relies on a fairly rigid worldview for its oxygen – the SHOCKERS! that scream at us in tabloid headlines are deviations from a conventional idea of the norm. But what’s behind the appetite for this sort of story? Do we tell tales of transgression to reinforce our collective boundaries or to challenge them?

For me there’s a close kinship between good journalism and good drama. I’m reminded of the words of John Galsworthy, who wrote Strife, the play I directed last summer, and who felt that the writer should aim “to set before the public no cut-and-dried codes, but the phenomena of life and character, selected and combined, but not distorted, by the dramatist’s outlook, set down without fear, favour, or prejudice, leaving the public to draw such poor moral as nature may afford”.

So when it comes to promoting the thing we’ve made, I’m faced with a real conundrum: on the one hand I want it to reach a wide audience, and I’m flattered that there’s an appetite to hear about my contribution to the process of making it; but on the other hand I think the really interesting thing about the work is contained in the work itself. I’m always struck, in art galleries, by how much more time people spend reading the notes next to the paintings than looking at the paintings themselves. I’m sure that’s the wrong way around.

Insouciant remake

En route to the airport the next morning I read that Doctor Foster is to be adapted into a new French version. It’s a cliché verging on racism, but I can’t help wondering whether the French will have a different attitude to a story about marital infidelity, and whether the tone of the press coverage will differ. I wonder, too, whether, in the home of Roland Barthes, there is as much space given to artists to talk about what they’ve made – in his 1967 essay, “The Death of the Author”, Barthes wrote that “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination”.

No stone unturned

Touring the villages of Gigondas, Sablet and Séguret later that evening, I’m struck by the provision of espaces culturels in seemingly every commune, however small. The French certainly give space to the work itself. But I also notice a sign warning of a chat lunatique, so decide to beat a hasty retreat. Arriving at the house where I’m staying, I’ve been told that the key will be under a flowerpot. Lifting each tub in turn, and finally a large flat stone by the door, I find a small scorpion, but no key. I’m writing this at a table less than a yard away so let’s hope there won’t be a sting in this tale.

Ink opens at the Duke of York Theatre, London, on 9 September. More details: almeida.co.uk